I did two installs, one from the latest daily netinst and one from
the corresponding businesscard CDs.

They produce different sources.list files. The "businesscard"
install does not contain a "deb cdrom..." line, while the "netinst"
does. I must have been confused. I never imagined they would be
different!

However, I stand by what I said:

Putting the install CDrom into sources.list makes sense when you are
installing from a full CD (or DVD) set, because there's a large
amount of significant information on them, *and* the main reason why
you might want to install that way is because of limited (or *no*)
network access. I agree with that.

But, it does *not* make sense for a businesscard or netinst install.
For either of those, you must have reasonable network access to have
any chance of succeeding. Making people keep their install CD around
forever (or until they edit their sources.list file -- which I
contend again is extremely newbie-unfriendly) and making them put it
in the drive every single time they want to install a new application
is just silly. It smacks of MicroSoft. (I know -- Debian's motives
are different, but the user-visible result is the same.)

Rick

PS: For the record -- this bug report mentions a couple other
problems -- Neither of these installs encountered the problem with
the missing "etc/mkinitramfs" directory. And both of them were
missing the "lspci" command -- both were bare-bones installs (no
"Desktop" task selected).